A recent study by moneysupermarket.com shows that nearly 60% of British mobile phone owners have no intention to use sites like mobilephonexchange.co.uk to recycle old handsets, despite having an average of 2 old phones lying around unused.

While 13% of people asked in the study said they weren’t aware of the ability to recycle their old mobiles, 8% said that they knew of services such as mobilephonexchange.co.uk but simply couldn’t be bothered to use such a site. This has meant that 5.25 million of the 75 million handsets currently in the UK (7% and more than one for every resident) will end up in a landfill site. These discarded handsets have an estimated value of over £150 million.

Industry watchdogs have put this down to the ever-evolving nature of the mobile phone market, with newer and better handsets being introduced to the consumer each and every week. Manager of mobiles at moneysupermarket.com James Parker said "People are constantly craving the latest gadget. This need to have the best and newest mobile phone on the market has resulted in many people accumulating spare handsets".

With more and more people throwing their old mobiles in the bin instead of recycling them there have been efforts from both the public and private sectors to increase people’s knowledge of the services available to them, National Recycle Your Mobile Phone Week is to start at the end of October. Hopefully this will encourage more people to go green and recycle their mobile and make a bit of money instead of just throwing it, and their money, away.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=3204701